1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a board useful for rolling pastry dough.
2. Description of Related Art
Typically pastry dough is rolled on a conventional rolling board whose temperature is close to the ambient room temperature. When pastry dough is rolled in the typical manner, heat absorbed by the pastry dough from the rolling pin, rolling board and handling of the dough throughout the rolling process heats a shortening, or fat, ingredient in the dough, causing sticking.
While it is possible to reduce sticking by applying excess flour to the conventional rolling board and rolling pin, this can have adverse consequences for the final pastry product. For example, adding excessive amounts of flour causes the pastry to be hard and dry.
Maintaining the dough chilled while rolling is believed to reduce the gluten strands in the dough, which can make the pastry dough tough. Also, chilling relaxes the gluten in the flour and helps to prevent stickiness. Several methods have been tried to maintain chilled conditions during the rolling process, however they all suffer several adverse consequences.
First, the addition of a small amount of cold water to the pastry dough has been tried. However, pastry dough requires only a small amount of water which is sufficient to hold the pastry dough together. This small amount of water is hardly adequate for keeping the pastry dough mixture cold for the length of time required to roll the pastry dough.
Second, keeping a conventional rolling board, for example a marble slab, chilled prior to rolling the pastry dough has also been tried. However, the conventional pastry board soon heats up from the rolling process and loses its effectiveness in keeping the pastry dough chilled throughout the rolling process. This method is even more inadequate when several batches of pastry dough are to be rolled over a period of several hours. Also, it is difficult to obtain a substantially constant and uniform temperature across the rolling board when using this method.
Third, a rolling pin filled with ice has been used in an attempt at maintaining the pastry dough chilled during the rolling process. This method is also flawed in terms of providing a uniform cold temperature for the pastry dough and maintaining the uniform cold temperature over an extended period of several hours. In addition, this method does not account for the thermal transfer of heat from the conventional rolling board to the pastry dough, thus also making this conventional method of chilling pastry dough inadequate.
It can be seen that there is a need for an improved apparatus and method of maintaining pastry dough chilled during the rolling process.